You are sitting with a female friend, enjoying a cup of tea and talking about the musical styling of Duffy and the peculiar nature of coated guitar strings and how people could come to use them over normal cutting edge strings. Your friend then tells you that she wants to tell you something very important and stands up, walks around the table, and sidles up next to you.
The first thing to wither in a failing economy are the rights of the minority individual. I’ll give you a real world example that will set the ominous tone to come for the rest of us.
We don’t like to use the word “crippled” today — because we prefer to gloss over that historic, condemning, label with “disabled” — but the Government Accountability Office recently reported that schools are now restraining and punishing crippled children just because they are disabled.
In Kabul, Afghanistan, women are being newly incarcerated in their marriages even as the USA tries to free the country.
Saartjie Baartman was considered a South African sexual freak by Caucasian culture. In 1810, when she was 20, she was convinced to leave her homeland for fame in England. Her traditional Khoikhoi body type was considered freakish in Western Culture and she was put on sexual display. Her bare breasts and genitals were open for the gaping. She was given the nickname “Hottentot Venus” for her presumptive beauty, though in Khoikhoi, “hottentot” means “stutterer.” Saartjie was dead at 25 and her genitals and brain were pickled for continued, public, display.
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
On Saturday the 28th of February at the Institute of Education in London, the UK consensus on a fight-back against intrusions into privacy finally gets going with the inaugural Convention on Modern Liberty.
Continue reading → Modern Liberty and Sectarian UK ID Card Schemes
Jamie Grace wrote this article.
I’d like to put forward the idea that by using surveillance and monitoring in our society as we progress through the Information Age we are creating new ‘information minorities’ – not those who are the least monitored and overwatched, those who are subject to the most surveillance and scrutiny, for whatever reason: state security, criminal justice, politics or ‘research.’
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